“This is ground zero,” Senate Majority Leader Johnny Ellis (D-Anchorage) says as we drive through his neighborhood, Fairview, with Fairview Community Patrol head Lee Ross. “I monitor this corner out here.”

“He’s actually a block watcher and he’s given me information,” Ross says.

“Oh, I call in the prostitutes and the drug dealers, chronic public inebriates,” Ellis says. Ellis, in his role as a legislator, is tackling issues of substance abuse and chronic public inebriates, particularly the homeless, and no neighborhood in Anchorage illustrates those issues better than his own.

As we cruise through Fairview with Ross, an hour or so after the liquor stores have opened, we see a group of people drinking at a bus stop; Ross points out drug dealers that he recognizes walking down the street; near Central Lutheran Church empty bottles of beer and Monarch vodka litter the greenbelt overlooking A Street; empties and garbage litter the walkways that were put in to keep pedestrians off the street.

It’s early in the day and we don’t come across anyone lying on the ground passed out (or worse). This summer has seen a record number of homeless alcoholics dying on Anchorage’s streets—so much so that Mayor Dan Sullivan has organized a task force headed by Fairview resident Darrell Hess to address the issue, and Ellis has succeeded in getting a ten-bed facility at the Salvation Army’s Clitheroe Center where chronic public inebriates can be involuntarily committed by a judge.

Ellis points to a spot on 13th Avenue. “There used to be a bus stop that we tore out because they were doing their prostitution business in the little shelter,” he says. “I don’t like that scene at all in my neighborhood, but it really freaks me out when they’re passed out there, and you don’t know if they’re dead or alive. Should I call CSP [Community Service Patrol] or are they just taking a nap? The people passed out in your front yard starts to affect your property value, and for the people that have kids, it’s demoralizing and upsetting.”

As bad as the neighborhood looks when you’re cruising around and observing the prostitutes, the drug dealers, and the homeless alcoholics, Ross can point to clear examples of recent progress.

He drives to Fairbanks Park, a tidy little park with a playground at the bottom of a hill where 11th Avenue dead-ends. The park lies directly in the path from downtown to the liquor stores on Gambell at 12th and 13th Avenues, and used to be popular with chronic inebriates, who’d sit, drink, and often pass out on the hillside. Now there’s a fence across the top of the hill, and the park is clean, with a few people walking their dogs through it.

“This is one of the most gratifying things we did as a group,” Ross says. “We got this fence built to stop the migration pattern of these people.”

“And the neighborhood is gentrifying,” Ellis adds. “The whole area is upgrading. The property values have gone up in this area. But the public inebriate problem is a drag on the development of the area.”

When he patrols, Ross monitors the neighborhood, taking notes and calling in problems to the cops. Sergeant Denny Allen, a constant presence in Fairview, says the community patrols are a separate set of eyes and ears for the police department. “People don’t see them on the front lines like they would a police officer, that’s why they’re effective,” Allen says.

“When I monitor my area there from my balcony or my bathroom window, when it’s just normal stuff, if there’s somebody down, I’ll call the CSP and say I don’t know if this guy’s dead or taking a nap, but he needs help,” Ellis says. “But when I call the cops, if I can honestly say there’s a man beating the crap out of a woman out there, the cops are there in 30 seconds, no longer than a minute. But if it’s just drunks being noisy or cussing or harassing grandma going to the grocery store that’s not a priority. I kind of understand that—they have to triage the threat.”

The Fairview Community Patrol also works with landlords in the area to educate them about tenant screening and dealing with problem renters. The work these volunteer community activists do is essential to combating the neighborhood’s problems; despite the progress, the homeless drunk problem exceeds the resources available to address it.

Alaska has, by far, the highest wine, beer and liquor taxes in the nation; for liquor, the tax is $12.80 per gallon. That’s nearly twice the next highest liquor tax: $6.50 in Florida. Those alcohol taxes brought in more than $38 million last year. Slightly less than half of that went to the Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Treatment and Prevention Fund. The rest went to the state’s general fund.

Senator Ellis wants to change that. He’s meeting with people from the alcohol industry and faith-based groups to lobby to put all or most of the alcohol taxes towards treatment and prevention in the next legislative session, which starts in January.

“To be politically straightforward, nobody’s interested in talking about higher liquor taxes,” Ellis says. “I’m gonna try to get a bipartisan group of liquor and church people and advocates and treatment people and the governor and whoever else to step in and say, that’s right, we need to spend more money from liquor taxes on the effects of liquor in the community.”

More money for substance abuse treatment and prevention may help, but it won’t solve all of Fairview’s problems. If it arrives, it’ll be just a part of a bigger solution—one that also encompasses Lee Ross’s Fairview Community Patrol and the Fairview Community Council, the mayor’s Homeless Leadership Team, the new secure treatment center at the Clitheroe Center, and whatever other resources the politicians and activists can gather.

Meanwhile, there are parts of his own neighborhood that Ellis won’t walk in after dark.

bjk@anchoragepress.com